Organization. It’s important. But not all of us are the type of rockstar that eats, sleeps, and breathes immaculately clean offices, color-coordinated highlighters, and perfectly sorted desktop folders. Some of us need a little extra help, and that’s where this article comes in.

If you’re new to Zingtree, or even if you’ve been with us a while and have never considered it, you should take some time to think about how you’re organizing your trees. Ask yourself who's using Zingtree, who’s creating or updating content, and what will be the most efficient way to manage your Trees regarding access, billing, usage, etc.

You can manage all of this by going to the My Account Menu and then selecting Organizations & Billing.

For some people, one Organization may be enough, but you may also want to keep things separate to differentiate your trees based on:

1. Billing and/or usage (Note: One Org can be responsible for Billing for Sub-Orgs)
2. Country and/or languages
3. Department and/or team
4. Internal Vs. External/Client facing Trees
5. Author/Agent Access
6. Different Reporting Needs

For example, if you’re using the Agent Portal, agents will have access to all the trees related to the Agent Organization(Providing tags are not being used to tailor access).

Pros of multiple Organizations

Here are some of the benefits of having multiple Organizations:

• Agents and Authors will only see Trees in their Organization
• Monitoring and Reporting can be specific to the Organization
• Easier management and maintenance of Trees
• Easier tracking of usage by Organization (Also helpful in managing your billing)

Cons of multiple Organizations

As with most things in life, there are trade-offs. Here are some of the drawbacks to weigh when considering setting up multiple Organizations:

• If Authors and Agents need access to multiple organizations, they need to be added separately.
• While you have more reporting options, it can create complexity when running joint reports for your different Organizations.
• Trees in one Organization are not accessible in another. If you have a tree that both your Authors and Agents need, you’ll have to duplicate it in both Organizations. This can make managing changes to that tree more complicated since you’ll need to update two separate trees each time you make a change.

Pros of a Single Organization

We’ve talked about the pros of multiple Organizations, but here are some reasons you might want to consider using a single Organization:

• Easier to monitor the usage and performance of all Trees
• You have a single view of all your Authors and Agents, making it easier to manage their access.
• You don’t need to update multiple versions of the same tree.

Cons of a Single Organization

Some of the drawbacks to using a single Organization are:

• Harder to manage or provide separate monitoring if there's a large volume of Trees used by multiple teams/departments. (Using Tags can help catalog and filter Trees to alleviate this pain point)

Things to consider when deciding which option to use

The biggest drivers for using one or multiple Organizations are generally the number of teams/departments using the Trees and the volume of Trees/Processes.

As the number of people and/or trees grows, it may make sense to add more Organizations in Zingtree. It’s a bit more work, but in the long run, it’ll make your life easier because you’ll be able to manage everything more efficiently. If you have a smaller team but still prefer to track things separately, and your Users, Authors, and Trees don't need to have access to other Organizations, then this might also be a good route for you.

If you decide to keep everything in the same Organization, then Zingtree provides you with tools (like Tags and Reporting) to label and monitor your Trees. You can also customize access based on your needs.

(Pro Tip: Tag an Agent in Agent Portal, so they only see the Trees you want them to.)

We have more information on adding or managing your Organizations here and getting started videos here.